


your turn (surprise me)

by livennadin



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Artist Keith (Voltron), Artist Lance (Voltron), Emotional Hurt, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:30:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13430892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livennadin/pseuds/livennadin
Summary: the story of lance and keith, both struggling and suffering their ways in life, unaware that their lives are bound to each other's with nothing more than a spiral bound sketchbook.





	1. keep me locked up in your broken mind

Evening sighed into existence, heavy and weary. The rusty oranges of the street lights disturbed the navy blue darkness as if burning holes in it.

The chair croaked under his weight. The boy had been sitting there, unmoving, for hours as his eyes bore out from the dirty window in front of his desk. He let the remaining tears burn and trickle down his face.

The door to the small flat opened and closed, welcoming a rush of cold air and shuffles of someone stepping in. He cleared his throat, not knowing if the sound was for the newcomer or himself. His hands moved to clutch the sketchbook on the desk as steps neared.

“Keith?” A male voice, his brother’s voice, rang in the room, hesitant. 

“I’m here.” The boy cleared his throat again, glancing back at the man in a clean, white shirt and ironed black trousers. 

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he asked whilst reaching fot he light switch. The boy didn’t answer, just blinked at the artificial light filling the room. 

The man in his working attire turned around then, sighing as he got out of the room. 

“I’m heating up some leftovers.”

The boy begrudingly got up to follow. 

He reasoned he might as well stomach some stuff now, there was no need to make Shiro worry more.

His brother didn’t ask about his bruised knuckles.

He didn’t ask his brother about the bags under his eyes.

They ate in silence. The boy ate quickly. He dogded around the lump of hurt and distance hovering over them, imitating the lumps each had in their throats, and ran back to his room to hole up for restless hours to come. 

The thing was and had been with Keith is that he either felt everything or he was numb in all senses. Days were bad, nights were worse. Sleep was a concept he couldn’t even remember properly.

Nevertheless, he climbed into his creaking bed, wondering how would it feel, the warmth of a mother’s hands tucking him in. He tossed the duvet over his head like closing four o’clock flowers. 

But he was nothing like a flower. He was a window glass: Dirtied with the rains that poured down and dried, making it unable for anyone to look through and _see_ , shattered with many blows from all around him, making him meaningless.

Or, better yet, he had shards of glass inside his rib cage. And they cut deeper and deeper with every breath.

He wrestled the duvet off when it got too hot under it.

He briefly dreamt of flames. Of how easily they swallow everything. Of the scars they left. He always wanted to stick his hand in them, wait until ashes came. He thought, for maybe the millionth time, that is he was to die, he wanted it to be in flames. He wanted it to be taking down whatever was around down with him.

But also, he was scared of fire.

Flames only knew how to take, how to eat away. Just like me, he thought. He wasn’t anything if he wasn’t fire. He was nothing if he wasn’t both the distinguished smoke and the raging flame.

His thoughts drifted back to the lady in the shop.

“This one’s special, I’m telling ya!” She had said, to no one in particular and to everyone ever.

Keith scoffed then, more tears were forming in his aching, bloodshot eyes.

Clearly, she was talking about the sketchbook she sold. 

Keith wasn’t special. Anyone could spark a fire alive with a cheap lighter, with the matches they found in the forgotten depths of the kitchen cabinet. 

He didn’t bother wiping the few tears away. He had cried for hours that day. So he couldn’t muster much after that anyways.

 

His bare feet touched the cold ground. Once strong, now average legs carried his hollow chest above them as the wooden boards bit him with frosty bites.

_Anyways, let’s check this sketchbook._

 

He got the cheap pencil he brought from the school cafeteria and stared at the bland, black and beaten down cover of the sketchbook. For some reason, the voice inside him had stopped spitting venom and told him to buy it when he was in the shop earlier on.

He opened the cover to sketch something. Anything. But the longer the ivory page stared back, the more jumpy he grew. His legs itched in frustration.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. After all, Keith had a tendency of being shit at things. But it hurt and angered him every single time. Sighing loudly and fairly longly he got up.

_I’ll try tomorrow. I’ll wake up for this._


	2. you keep living in your own lie

The sea gathered back the pieces of the salty waters after the waves threw themselves onto the razor sharp and ragged sided boulders to get splattered. They became whole, the waves and the sea, just to shatter again.

The house near the cliff drowned in arguments rather than the icy waters next to it.

He pushed the earbuds further in, slamming his eyelids shut.

Blues and greens and whites danced out his window, the sea repeating, like the two supposedly adults in the house insisted on yelling at each other. 

His hands shook as he tried to focus only on the music he’s blasting on his eardrums.

He often felt like troubled ships sailed on his chest. He imagined the sharp bottom of the ships slashing, causing the ache he knows well. He thought, like warm and cold currents poked the fish and moved the water in the sea, his good and bad days mocked whatever stability he had left.

His eyes drifted to a particularly high wave.

The waves were so familiar in the way they came together into a better whole to inevitably collapse and crumble. He picked up himself on the path to the better he he dreamt and hoped. Only to fall down, send everything crashing.

A not necessarily kind hand on his shoulder made him flinch.

He paused the song, took one earbud out.

“Dinner.” His mother stated.

“I ate before you came.” He lied.

He could not sit down with the bunch of strangers who didn’t get along that they called a family around a dinner table. He could not act unbothered by the stiffness in their shoulders that they squared and their neck that they bowed down.

She looked at him through narrowed and cold eyes at that. He knew she could tell his dishonesty. 

She turned around and left.

Because Lance was never enough for anybody to stay. He felt small quite commonly despite being the tallest person in the room most of the times. He crossed his arms over his chest, hands tucked away, hidden under his armpits and clasped his legs shut, taking up as small space as possible.

His trembling hands opened the bland, black and beaten down cover of the sketchbook in front of him. He had bought it after running his errands in the early hours, when the house was in his favourite condition: empty.

He turned his music up, going against the throbbing ache in his head.

He dug his hand into his backpack that slumped against the chair he was sitting on to retrive a pencil.

Pushing past the hungry hurt in his stomach, the pencil in his hand began tracing on the invisible lines only Lance could see, making it evident for the world too. 

He allowed himself to think of the waves again. Of how easily they swallowed and spited and swallowed. Once in the sea’s domain, you were in its mercy. And it terrified the boy. Just like it allured him.

Lance often found his steps nearing the cliff in their Icarus like glory. He found himself raising on the tip of his toes, peeking at the rocks and water below. 

He would fly. He would flow, free for once in his life before it eventually ends. The sea would greet him for the last time like it did to every other desperate soul. 

On the mornings where the wind whistled, upset about something, droplets of the salt water below Lance traveled up with the wind and grazed his face. It almost felt like an invitation. It nearly felt like the sea was daring him.

He never took on the offer.

He had tomorrows to wake up to.

 

He finished the sketch and reached for the little jars of rich blue inks perched on his desk. His restless legs bounced towards and against gravity under the white surface of the table.

He imagined what it would be like, to be pretty as a flower instead this ugly, hollow shell he was. He was like a sea shell. One that looked like a snail: Making a pitiful journey and spiraling down and down only to never reach a meaningful destination.

The boy flinched at the muffled sound and shameless vibrations from someone slamming a door somewhere in the house. 

His jump had caused the ink on his brush to spill erratically on the page.

Sighing, he started splashing blues on his flower-to-be sketch.

_I’ll make something beautiful out of this mess._

 

When Keith opened his eyes with absolutely no feeling existent in his numb state next morning, he found a flower painting done with blue ink that he had no memory of doing.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my take on that darker fic i've been meaning to write for a while now. i see the hurt i write keith and lance to experience as a way of expressing and processing myself.
> 
> maybe this can help someone feel a bit more understood and a bit less lonely.
> 
> you're never alone and always loved. please be safe.
> 
> you can find me on twitter, @aakaaashi


End file.
